Afriend
mused aloud over a Carlton terrace Pernod:
"The Martian school of poetry
rede­fines and revitalizes our response to the familiar objects and experiences of ter­restrial life by portraying them as if from the viewpoint of another planet. Take the poet Craig Raine. ..."But then it started
raining.

Two hours later, splashing into the palais des festivals for a celluloid warm­up, I was still thinking about what he said. If Martian poetry is an odd way of going about art, how about – Lights! Costumes! Action! – the
46th Cannes Film Festival? This was the weirdest French movie spree in years. For Mar­tians
gazing with fresh eyes on Earth, read
the Present emergency-landing on the
Past. We who came to learn about 1993
were shoved instead onto lecture-shuttles
going to 1893, 1793, 1493, 993....
Victorian New Zealand? Board Jane Campion'sThe Piano. Medieval Italy? PupiAvati'sMagnificat. Napole­onic Italy? The Tavianis' Fiorile. Mira­cle-mad 17th century somewhere in Europe? Peter Greenaway'sThe Baby of Macon.

Why this obsession with yesterdays at Cannes '93? Maybe because it's the shortest, most
illuminating route to tomorrow. We
knew something funny was being told us about Time and Space when we were all frogmarched
off the beach on Day Two – I hadn't even got my primer coat of suntan yet –
to see Abel Ferrara's Body
Snatchers (akaThe Siegel Has
Re-Landed). And this was followed a few nights later by Wim blen­ders' Faraway, So Close!.Ferrara's flick is all about the future landing on the present in a small U.S. Army base. Pod people from Outer Schlockland take over the cast and study/impersonate one cosmic community from the viewpoint of another. Wenders' epic followup to Wings of Desire (165 minutes and every one counts) was
also about – yes – beings from one
dimension coming to Earth to study
and impersonate those from another.
Now as we know from Commander L.P.
Hartley of the Star­ship
Go-Between, the past is a foreign planet.
So the Cannes filmmakers who launched themselves from one gravity system – Now – to another
– Then – were doing much the same as Wenders' life-enhancing good angels (if their films were
good) and Ferrara's soul-numbing pod-colonizers (if they
weren't).

Of the good, Campion and Avatiwere the early standouts. From its first showing, The Piano looked the
surest cinch for Golden Palm since Padre
Padrone. Indeed,
the shimmering primi­tivism and
power to new-mint emotion echo the
1977 Taviani film; and like the Tavianis,
the Australian director uses a geohistorical terra incognita – the re­mote New Zealand bush in the 19th century – as a way to explore the present through a sense-awakening encounter with the
past.

Campion's beat is feminism, but of a thrillingly nonconformist sort. In Sweetie
and An Angel at My Table she
gave us disturbed/dysfunctional
hero­ines, women on the verge of a
spiritual breakdown. But for them,
as for The Piano's mute, unmarried mother from Scotland,
Holly Hunter, who's pushed into an
arranged marriage with Antipo­dean
colonist Sam Neill, an alienated vision
is also an objectifying, truth-find­ing
one. Hunter's 19th century Miss, thrown
onto what seems another planet, is
given a shock education in Nature (jungly vistas), in Sex (gone-native neighbor Harvey Keitel),
and in the untouchable sanctity of
Art. Her be­loved piano is first
left abandoned on the seashore, then seized by Keitel
and used as an amorous bargaining
chip (he sells it back, one key per
sexual favor), and finally thrown
from the departure boat at Hunter's wish, the last redundant ballast
keeping her old life afloat.

Just as galvanic as the heroine's clash with alien reality is
the audience's. We cross not just sea but a
century. Cam­pion, deconstructing the modern world by reconstructing a bygone one, unset­tles all our "eternal verities" about
sex, love, female identity by
showing they're not eternal at all.
Other times, other truths.
(Therefore, guard each advance we
make.) In the disrupting process, Campion's movie releases all the feral stylistics
hinted at in her feature début, Sweetie. Early shots set in Scotland, plus
literary voiceover, may threaten Masterpiece Theatre. But once our her­oine is carried ashore in New Zealand– a
black-dressed body borne above a dozen
legs like a surf-borne spider – the past
becomes more than just a foreign country. It becomes a wilderness, a
bes­tiary, an UnpeaceableKingdom. The Campion camera invents its own callig­raphy. Shots swoop or arc like birds. Shots tell us that the human mind is a gateway to grace or chaos, as in the bizarre
moment when the camera tracks in towards
the heroine's spinsterly hair-knot and then
rises up and onward into the anarchic forest.

The movie finds preposterous aes­thetic rhymes, and each one works. The ribs of Hunter's hoop skirt –
portcullis to sex with Keitel – make harmony with the arching forest twigs she later crawls through in dismay and terror. A dog licks Sam Neill's hand, producing a transferred shudder of disgust, as he spies on Keitel using
his profaner tongue on Hunter. And
there's even a special, ancestral
rhyme for movie buffs. Which of
them, when Neill thwacks down on his
wife's pianistic hand with a nasty instrument, doesn't see the ghost of James Mason smashing Ann Todd's digits in The
Seventh Veil? Footnote for certifiable
film buffs: When Neill left New Zealand for his first Western acting role, it was James Mason who encour­aged and recommended him.

The Piano uses
past and present in rhyme
and counterpoint to create a fugue between the familiar and the far-off or farouche. Similar music is heard in the festival's other period pix.
Peter Greenaway'sThe Baby of
Macon, pas­tiching a 17th century mystery play, is a crazed chorale to the age of religious faith and (flipside) the
cynical exploita­tion of superstition.
Title character is a tot with
miraculous powers toted round a
French city by his "virgin' mother before both come to sticky ends. Stuffed (overstuffed) with Greenawaybric-à-brac– gold-and-scarlet décor, mile-high wigs, throngs of naked bodies, keening countertenors – the film still culture-shocks us with an age
in which we come to
see our own greeds and scams (and our attempts to gild
or cam­ouflage
them) as in a Velasquez distort­ing mirror.

Avati'sMagnificat intercuts half a dozen 10th century stories on
eternal themes:
birth, death, sex, God. But the early-medieval setting gives them a fresh reverberance. The girl baptized into convent life, the royal
courtesan giving birth,
the grim work-round of an execu­tioner: under a sky
bright with religious belief and dark with the fears of Hell, the banal and momentous swap roles. Looking down on Planet Middle
Ages from Planet
Now, we wonder how death was regarded so casually or serenely, sex and sensuality with such fear
and distrust.

These costume films stand modern sensibility in front of a Schüfftan "mir­ror." Part of it seems to reflect the present – our own faces in an artwork our own time has created –
and part to offer an unsilvered view
through to the past. The mixture can be
clumsy. Brit­ain's Chris Newby in Anchoress, another tale of religious
faith in the age of peasants and
pudding-bowl haircuts, wins the
Great-Settings-But-Oh-God-They've-Opened-Their-Mouths
award. Medieval Britain is photographed with a bleak, persuasive beauty worthy of Andrei Roublev, but the dialogue is Monty Python gone stale. Even
the Taviani brothers in Fiorilebegin
to look a bit rent-a-period. Haven't
these corn­fields, doublets,
donkeys, and crumbly cathedrals been
seen before? And the Tavs' message for today, about
the cor­rupting power of worldly
wealth – do we really give it 10 out
of 10 for originality?

By contrast, the treatment of history in Chen Kaige's ambitious
and powerful Farewell to My Concubine focuses a multitude of questions. Here our time – space shuttle delivers us to bygone China, departure point for a trip
through that
country's stations of political agony during the 20th century. Last time we did this trip, our guide was Bertolucci'sLast Emperor. Chen offers two Peking Opera singers (Leslie Cheung,
Zhang Fengyi) hanging on to the emergency cord of their ancient art as
China rattles through
Japanese invasion, nationalist victory, Communist rebellion, Maoist dictatorship, and that ruthless
bonfire of the vanities – the people
went up in smoke along with their
possessions – called the Cultural Revolution.

The funny thing about this three-hour historical fresco is
that, for two hours, it knocks out the eyes,
mind, and senses, and then it gets
knocked out itself by history. When
wise enough to foreground the human story – the two heroes and their
struggle to perfect their public
craft and resolve their private jeal­ousies
(Cheung loves Zhang, Zhang loves courtesan Gong Li) – Chen Kaigecreates
a brilliant sounding-board both for the din
of history and for our own thoughts
on art and politics. But by Mao-time
the captions begin to outnum­ber the
scenes between. "China 1945," "China 1948," "China 1966, the Cultural Revolution," "China 1977" – no no, stop the history lesson, we want to get off. Our three cunningly contrasted protago­nists – He, She, and AC/DC – become little
more than interchangeable puppet-figures
barking out prescribed responses of fear or defiance or grief.

The Martian school of moviemaking has one, and only one, simple rule: DON'T EDITORIALIZE. Allow the years their proper time, the characters their proper space, the unfamiliar to stay unfa­miliar: at least
until the past has sponta­neously found the
same frequency as the present, or
the frequency on which Back Then
makes the most interest­ing
compare-and-contrast noises with Right
Now.

A couple of other Eastern films – Hou Hsiao-Hsien'sThe Puppet-master and TianZhuangzhuang'sBlue Kite
– had a go at juggling time
zones and counterpointing
private lives with public events. Hou'sTaiwan film is a doorstopping domestic epic (two and a half
hours) about a real-life puppet mae­stro,
Li Tien Lu, who moonlighted as an actor in earlier Hou pix,
and his longwinded troubles with
family and his­tory. Trouble is, none of the troubles seem like big ones. Or even very inter­esting ones.

Compare Blue Kite, wherein a three-generation family goes through the Mao­ist hells of persecution, rural exile, "criticism" (that is, peer pressure as a form of mental torture), and the brutal thought-policing of Mao's Red Army. This film never stops to deliver a lec­ture. All the sobering horror is in the events and the characters' reactions to them: caught by the camera's delicate neorealist
framings and its attention to minutiae of
face or gesture.

Delicate or not, Blue Kite
was enough to rattle today's
Chinese thought police. They first
stopped the director from completing
the film in China – it was postproduced
in Japan by Tian'sassociates, following his shot-by-shot instructions – and then he was denied a
visa to attend the Cannes world première.

Blue Kite is a masterclass in letting a story find its own power without autho­rial pedagoguery. But "Don't editorial­ize"
is a hard lesson. In Faraway, So Close! evenWimWenders – who,
God knows, can have the patience of
the East (see Kings of the Road, The State of Things) – panics
a little in the face of the illimitable. This new movie is Wings of
Desire 2. That
is, Berlin
angel Otto Sander takes his turn to follow Bruno Ganz to Earth and become human. Time, Memory, and Emotion are again the themes. But they don't grow organi­cally from the story as in Wings (1): they're spelled out on the screechy blackboard of the new film's voiceovers or neon-written alongside the showbiz metaphysics of the casting.
Peter Falk (serial TV star
as symbol of eternity); Willem
Dafoe (Scorsese Christ flap­jacked into Wenders Devil) as the evil "Emit Flesti"
(spell it backwards); Horst Buchholz as the arms-running Industrial Age baddie (Magnificent
Seven + One, Two, Three = maleficent
13); and even Mikhail Gorbachev in scene one, receiv­ing a hand on the shoulder from still-invisible Sander as he pens great Gorbyisms
for posterity.

Wenders' Martianism aims to answer the riddle of "What does it mean to be human?"
by bringing an alien onlooker to Earth. The Christ
parallels are patent. But so is the
feeling that after Wings of Desire, where Peter Handke's tougher cerebrations stiffened the script, Wen­ders has run out of ways to make mortal­ity seem novel. Instead, in Faraway, So Close! it ends up seeming
like a novel – Robert Ludlum or Ian
Fleming,
to boot – as the climax explodes in shootouts, hijacked
boats, and a trapeze-artist heist of which
all we can say is, It's fun but is it art?

Abel
Ferrara's Body Snatchers
– the third version of The Invasion of – isfun, and let's
call it art while no one's looking. Ferrara was roughed up by some Cannes malcontents for taking the twice-told movie
fable and surgically extracting its subtlety.
The pod people taking over this U.S. Army base somewhere in Nowhere, Middle America, are tele­graphic zombies with staring eyes and (when roused) raucous cries. When bodies are usurped, a spaghetti-ish infes­tation runs amok over the human faces. And the film's climax, a merry hell of pursuit, death, and small kids thrown from helicopters, is subtle only by com­parison with Driller Killer.

Yes,
dear colleagues, but 1993 is not Don Siegel's 1956 nor
Phil Kaufman's 1978. Today's
millennial stakes are higher. The
first era was one of Eisen­howerian
faux-serenity, when podpersonshad to behave like Norman Rockwell to fit into smalltown life. The second was circa Star Wars and CE3K, when things that came from Outer Space were sup­posed to be Nice. Today, apocalyptic nastiness is a movie norm, so a creepy initial setting – army base as seedbed for indoctrination and emotional
automa­tism – must
be outcreepied by the crea­tures. Body Snatchers gives the Martian school of cinema a nihilist twist by sug­gesting the space invaders see us not as brave and
willful earthpersons who must be tamed, but as crawling, corruptible lifeforms pretty much like themselves.

Or – hold the Best Director prize – like the lifeforms in Mike
Leigh's Naked. Leigh's latest is not so much
a movie, more a
microscope session in the insect lab. Placing on glass slides the seedy London dwellers who
people his entropic
underworld, with their grungy mating rituals, restless anomie, and bab­bling non sequiturs, Leigh then
exam­ines the
effect on these folk of a human virus from Manchester. This is the film's "hero;" played by
David Thewlis (Best Actor prize) with a Doomsday wit and all-weather sarcasm. He first
lays waste his ex-girlfriend's shared
apartment, ver­bally and sexually, and
then mooches off to preach the End
of the World to the midnightstreetpeople.

Naked is bleak stuff even from the maker of Bleak
Moments. But it pro­vided Cannes's cinema of alien perspec­tives with the perfect coup de grâce.
Everyone here
treats everyone else as creatures from another planet. Man­chester could be Mars to London's Earth; an
articulate philosopher-bum could be
an extraterrestrial to the dim-witted mental down-and-outs he meets on every streetcorner.
No need to fanta­size outsider's viewpoints in order to redefine reality: we all end up using sign language to everyone else as we try to say "I come in peace' or "Take me to your leader."

Cannes
warmed to Leigh's film, but then it would. The event is living proof of Leigh's thesis. No sane
person could be
expected to make sense of any­thing or anyone here without days or weeks of practice. Even then,
you can be stymied
by the unexpected. How are you meant to react to a 40-foot inflatable ArnieSchwarzenegger
standing in the bay moored to a barge? (He and
his real-life
alter ego were both in Cannes puff­ing Last
Action Hero.) Or to the sight
of glamorous Liz Taylor sweeping in
to scatter charisma and host
$25,000-a-table AIDS benefit
dinners? Or to snow falling where
there ain't no snow. This was white soapflakes
billowing down from the palais
roof to celebrate
Sly Stal­lone's snowy comeback in Cliffhanger.

Above all, what does your average newcomer from Mars, Moon, or
Earth make of the
spectacle of ?,000 journal­ists brainstorming daily over ?,000 films as the countdown to who-won and who-didn't-win begins? Me, I wouldn't give a week's supply of croissants to see a space alien's reaction just to the critics charts in the (ever multiplying) festi­val mags. Some have
stars and blobs. Others lovingly
fractionate numbers – how do you decide on "3.2" out of 10 for Britain's stretcher-case comedy Splitting Heirs? One mag even has crosses for BAD and what look like walking
chicken-feathers –
one, two, three, four – for varying degrees of GOOD. Eventually I was told that these are meant
to repre­sent
palms. But not even a Martian would draw a palm like that.

As for the Golden Frond itself, it went ex aequo to The Piano and Fare­well to My
Concubine; and Holly Hunter
grabbed Best Actress. What is this? The world's festival juries are finally meting out just and well-consid­ered awards? I went straight home and tore up my application form for emigra­tion to another planet.